Sunday, July 8, 2012

Syria : Assange's Get Out Card - With Wikileaks Releasing Syrian Emails, Will People Realize It's Not Just Targeting The U.S.?

from the radical-transparency dept

One of the bizarre issues that came out after Wikileaks began releasing its treasure trove of US State Department cables, was this suggestion from the US government that Wikileaks was clearly an anti-US organization. However, as has been pointed out time and time again, it's not: it's an anti-secrecy organization. You can agree or disagree with that position, but the various attempts to brand Wikileaks and Julian Assange as particularly anti-American (and to even look to use Espionage Act claims against them) always seemed misguided. With the latest release of millions of Syrian government emails, it makes you wonder if those same people who were complaining about the organization being anti-American are now also complaining about it being "anti-Syrian."

Randomly, this can't be particularly surprising when, as we noted a few months ago, some hackers had worked out that a large number of high level government officials in Syria used 12345 as their email password.